Number of Hungry People Will Continue to Rise

In a recent article by the BBC, it was reported that the ‘number of people suffering from acute hunger around the world rose by 75 million people last year’ due to failures in aid delivery and development planning for the world’s poor. I would like to say that I’m surprised by this, but alas, I am not. As pointed out by Geoffrey Dennis, the chief executive of CARE UK, ‘It is a disgrace that money is still being spent in the wrong ways.’ We, the international development practitioners and funders, have so far failed to read the writing on the wall that has accumulated over the course of the past 50 years, that has been telling us that top down, stop-gap and market oriented (i.e. attempting to create markets where they traditionally do not exist or are weak) solutions will not improve the lives and livelihoods of the world’s poor. Instead of improving food security through the use of local knowledge and expertise in gardening, perma-culture and small-scale farming, we offer boatloads of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) soya and maize and/or drought -resistant strains of the same grains. Don’t get me wrong, there is a time and place for food aid, but even that can be made more efficient through cash purchases of local products within a specific region instead of shipping subsidized grain halfway across the planet at a sometimes ridiculous cost. Luckily, much of the world is waking up to this realization and implementing agencies are beginning to move away from past models of food aid delivery and programming. However, it’s not enough.  I agree. It is a disgrace that we continue to work within a system that has little to no accountability and that allows one set of sovereign nations to dictate the rules of the game to other sovereign nations. I’m just not sure that these alarm bells are going to be enough to change a system that has ‘dedicated’ itself to protecting the most vulnerable, who in turn have little voice in which projects they can implement and even less in how the billions of dollars in aid money is allocated. It’s time that we begin listening to what people want and allow them access to more un-tied aid resources, instead of telling them what they need.